Ostuni historical timeline

People have been on this hill for a very long time, and Ostuni holds the evidence of it.

Delia

At Santa Maria di Agnano, just outside the town, excavation uncovered the burial of a young pregnant woman, laid out carefully with her head supported by stones, the bones of the foetus still in position. She is roughly 28,000 years old and is among the oldest such burials known anywhere. Locally she is called Delia, and she is displayed in the town museum.

Messapians and Rome

The hill was a Messapian settlement, walled in the fourth century BC, before passing to Rome. A persistent local story has the town destroyed by Hannibal and rebuilt afterwards, which is where the folk etymology of the name as a Greek phrase for "new town" comes from; neither claim is secure.

Normans and after

The Normans took the area in the eleventh century and gave the town its castle and its shape. It passed through Angevin and Aragonese hands, and in the fifteenth century, under Isabella, Duchess of Bari, and then her daughter Bona Sforza, the cathedral was completed and the town prospered.

Why it is white

The limewashing is usually tied to the plague of 1657, which swept southern Italy and which Ostuni largely escaped. Lime is a disinfectant, it was quarried and burnt locally, and the practice of coating everything with it stuck. It also reflects heat and made the poorest houses look the same as the rest.

Modern

Agricultural and quiet until the late twentieth century; tourism arrived properly in the 1990s.